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It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves. How common is this behavior at bars in general, independent fro

• karinqe 14y ago
  The cards could be given for any non-appropriate behavior, not just sexual harassment of women. Keep in mind that there are also some sexist women that can't behave themselves. EDIT: The cards don't seem to be gender specific, though it is implied that they will be mainly used by females.
• FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women. I think it'd be helpful to identify why this problem exists in the tech field. Is there a chicken and egg situation where more women in tech would solve these problems, but something about tech prevents more women getting involved?
  • agpen 14y ago
    THIS is what prevents more women from going into tech fields. From academia to the workplace, IT/CS has been built into a self-reinforcing boys club. Until on a large scale it is no longer socially acceptable for geeks to treat women like shit, there won't be many women in technical fields.
    • s_baby 14y ago
      Proof? Some research suggests women are turned off from the "hard" sciences before they reach high school. It's likely a factor but you're putting the cart before the horse.
      • illuminate 14y ago
        "Some research suggests women are turned off from the "hard" sciences before they reach high school" This is not unrelated to how they're turned off further after and into their careers.
      • demewmew 14y ago
        I think what agpen is trying to say is, "Statements like this are offputting to some people [women] who want to participate in tech." That's going to vary by the individual, but acknowledging that these statements have an offputting effect is proof in itself. Most people reading those statements aren't going to step in and say "this makes me not want to participate," because they know they won't be taken seriously. So instead they just leave.
        • bethly 14y ago
          Citations provided: http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-not-to-study http://blog.bethcodes.com/is-the-internet-convincing-women-n... The includes links to studies (like Sapna Cheryan, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Saenam Kim, Classrooms matter: The design of virtual classrooms influences gender disparities in computer science classes, Computers & Education, Volume 57, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 1825-1835, ISSN 0360-1315,) that show a "lack of ambient belonging", that is being alienated by other group members, was the primary cause, and another that interacting with sexist male engineers lowered women's performance ( http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~billvh/LWSIvHB.JPSP.09.pdf) Few people seem willing to accept that the lack of women in tech has something to do with men, but it does. Included the "high school girls" who aren't interested: the Girl Scout's study found that the biggest thing keeping them out was expecting to face sexism if they chose those professions.
        • s_baby 14y ago
    • deleted 14y ago
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  • colmvp 14y ago
    "From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women." I agree that the props idea is stupid, but men do have things differently. Men don't have to resort to using crazy schemes largely because women overwhelmingly don't approach men. And men who are sexually or physically assaulted by women have a significant fear of being ridiculed by society for not fighting back (or in the case of sexual assault, enjoying it).
  • karinqe 14y ago
    If a woman acts inappropriately towards a man, he rarely has any option to make her fuck off. "Men don't have to do it"? They can't. It's only that it happens less often (I guess). Seems to me that women have a lot more power in this regard.
    • agpen 14y ago
      When 1 in 4 men get sexually assaulted during their lives, I will start giving one iota of care about poor poor dis-empowered men.
      • cbs 14y ago
        edit: I give up. Who was I to think that the fact 1-in6 men are sexually abused while underage was a quick and easy response to a remark that men are not sexually assaulted in any real numbers. I should have looked up the statistics on all demographics, because apparently that sexual abuse isn't good enough sexual abuse to refute the weight the parent poster was giving to the 1-in-4 women statistic. Thanks sethg, I see clearly now.
        • sethg 14y ago
          Right, but that’s during childhood, not as an adult going to work and attending technical conferences. I can think of only one person I’ve met since turning 18 who was, umm, skeevy to me in a sexual way, and that person was male. (He didn’t actually assault me, but I later learned that one MIT fraternity had nicknamed him “the NAMBLA man”, and a while after that there was an article in the school paper reporting that he had just done time for rape.)
          • deleted 14y ago
            [deleted]
        • reinhardt 14y ago
          Yeap, judging from the downvotes in all sibling posts, the "think of the women" PC brigade is on witchhunt tonight. God forbid someone brings up an area where men are less pampered. Oh well.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    "From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. Men don't have to do it, why should women." Like Hollaback, this is a very imperfect, but apparently effective solution. I appreciate your appeals to straw Feminism, but "women should react the same as men to every situation to 'prove' they are strong" is not it, it's a mess of privileged assumptions.
    • FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
      It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally. I'll concede that imperfect but effective solutions are probably necessary to help foster this sort of equality in the long run, though, and the more people who step up and take responsibility for pushing the change (regardless of gender), the better.
      • illuminate 14y ago
        "It's not that they "should react the same", it's that - ideally - they shouldn't have to act differently to be treated equally." Totally. Putting your hands over your ears and eyes isn't going to get us to that point.
  • sethg 14y ago
    From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they have power. I know that if I grab my boss’s crotch during a meeting and he says ”you have thirty seconds to convince me not to fire your sorry ass right now”, every witness to the event and everybody above him in the corporate hierarchy will back him up. A man tempted to do the same thing to a woman less powerful than himself does not have the same assurance that he will suffer consequences for his bad behavior, and you can’t just create that sense of assurance by fiat. (As the Readercon debacle indicated, even written policies are no guarantee.) So people of good will are still trying to figure out how to hack the social environment to achieve a better culture, and until the rules of that culture become second nature to us all, then those social hacks will seem like, well, hacks.
    • demewmew 14y ago
      So well said. When people don't take you seriously, clever hacks are the next best solution. The "What She Really Said" IRC bot story reminds me of this as well.
      • blhack 14y ago
        No they're not. The cards thing establishes the premise that women are incapable of holding social status. They're not. The cards enforce the very thing they're trying to prevent.
        • illuminate 14y ago
          The cards are a reflection of reality, not an endorsement of the current state of things. Your tactic of putting your hands over your eyes and ears has been tried, at length in the past. It hasn't ever worked wherever it's been tried.
  • efa 14y ago
    I'm curious if this is a unique problem for tech workers. I'm sure if you look at conferences from any field there will be incidents of sexual harassment. Is this a problem unique to tech or a general problem of idiot men working with women? I've worked mostly in corporate environments. If I had to characterize a type that was in need of sensitivity training, it usually wasn't the tech guys, it was the "business" type (marketing, finance). Of course that's just my experience.
• asmithmd1 14y ago
  Instead of the red card if someone touches you inappropriately why not slap them in the face - hard.
  • blhack 14y ago
    This is exactly the consensus that all but one of my hacker friends, including the women, have come to. No. If you assault me, guess what's happening? I'm going to hit you in the fucking face, and most of the people here, since we're, you know, a community are going to physically remove you from the area. Edit: if this wasn't clear, the "I" in this story is would be my female friends.
    • learc83 14y ago
      >No. If you assault me, guess what's happening? I'm going to hit you in the fucking face Have fun explaining that to the cops (and the jury). "After I touched her inappropriately she slapped me, so fearing for my life, I punched her in the face, breaking her nose" Hell, if you do that you're likely to get punched in the face by a random passerby.
      • asmithmd1 14y ago
        assault is harmful or offensive contact. The assault happened with the first inappropriate touch.
        • sukuriant 14y ago
          Devil's advocate: Prove a grope occurred. It's a light, soft-tissue touch. A slap is a violent strike with an open palm, and a punch is a violent strike with a closed fist.
          • learc83 14y ago
            >A slap is a violent strike with an open palm, and a punch is a violent strike with a closed fist. A slap from a 110 pound woman (just a hypothetical weight) is not equal to a punch from a 160 pound man. A punch from the man can easily cause lasting harm--broken nose, broken jaw--an open-handed slap across the cheek from the woman cannot (barring some crazy edge case). >Prove a grope occurred. She's not going to have to. The cop who arrests you is going to believe the crying bleeding woman over the man with barley a scratch on him--and eventually the prosecutor and the jury will too. It's best just not to punch someone much physically weaker than you are unless you actually fear for your safety, e.g., she's holding a knife.
• protolif 14y ago
  "It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves. How common is this behavior at bars in general, independent from a hacker con?" This. Very much this. The formula is simple: Get a bunch of people drunk, and the lecherous ones will come out of the woodwork. This is not a problem unique to any particular field. In fact, I would go as far as to say this is a non-problem. If you can't deal with it, then stop choosing to hang out in bars. Often, it is the women who cry the loudest, that crave and seek out the kind of negative attention described here, so that they can boast about their own attractiveness to other females, while pretending to be disgusted. There are many more severe forms of oppression, that deserve our attention more than this.
  • MichaelSalib 14y ago
    Please go read the original post and pay special attention to the bit where con security gives out awards for people who run around demanding that women show their tits.
    • protolif 14y ago
      I'd like to see some evidence before believing such a tale. If such punch cards did exist, then I'm sure that there would be a picture of one online. In other words: Screenshot, or it didn't happen.
      • KuraFire 14y ago
        I’d like to give you a yellow card for your tired and sexist casual and nonsensical dismissal of a claim made by a woman about an actual experience she had. With all the shit women get whenever they raise their voice on these matters, they truly have near-zero incentive to conjure up lies. Worse, her example of the cards is hardly the worst, most inconceivable thing to be suggested as something that really does happen. Rape and assault really do happen, it's far less difficult to imagine that some guys don't understand how a bingo card with "get a woman to flash her tits at you" is a massive problem and not “just a bit of fun.”
• wpietri 14y ago
  Honestly, I don't care how common it is at bars generally. If it's my community, then I want this shit stopped. Do you think some of those women would be willing to post here? There's nothing that says that women can't hand out these cards. Or that they can't be handed out to dudes harassing dudes.